Impact of industrialization

Long hours (12–14 a day), dangerous unguarded machines, low wages, and harsh factory discipline.

Large workplaces where many workers used powered machines together, working to a fixed clock and bell.

Slum housing, overcrowding, pollution from coal smoke and waste, and disease such as cholera.

A fast-killing disease caught from water polluted with sewage; it spread because crowded slums had dirty water, causing major outbreaks in the 1830s and 1840s.

Children as young as six changed spools and cleared jammed threads in cotton mills, or pulled carts and opened air doors in coal mines.

Many women earned wages in mills and workshops instead of working alongside the family at home, shifting the family economy toward pooled wages.

The household survived by pooling many small wages, including those of women and children, not just a single male earner.

The working class owned only their labour and lived in slums; the middle class owned the machines and capital, grew wealthy, and moved to cleaner suburbs.

The historians' argument over whether industrial workers gained or lost: optimists say they slowly gained, pessimists say they lost, especially early on.

Optimists stress rising wages and cheaper goods over time; pessimists stress falling health, disease and lost freedom in the early decades.

It separated home from the workplace for the first time, as family members left each morning for different mills and mines, slowly reshaping family roles.

The effects were mixed and varied by time, place and job; early decades were harsh, but living standards slowly improved over the long term.

Skilled textile workers in northern England who smashed the new machines they blamed for lost jobs and falling wages. Machine-breaking was made a capital crime.

On 16 August 1819, cavalry charged a peaceful crowd of about 60,000 at St Peter's Field, Manchester, who were demanding the vote. About 15 people were killed. It was mockingly named after Waterloo.

The right to vote in elections. Working people and fast-growing industrial cities had little or no franchise before reform.

An organised group of workers who bargain together for better pay and conditions, giving strength in numbers against employers.

Six farm labourers were sentenced to transportation to Australia simply for forming a trade union, causing national outrage over workers' rights.

The first mass working-class political movement, named after the People's Charter (1838). It demanded the vote and workers' rights through huge petitions, all rejected by Parliament.

Universal male suffrage, a secret ballot, pay for MPs, equal constituencies, no property qualification, and annual parliaments. Five of the six later became law.

History is a class struggle; under capitalism the bourgeoisie exploit the proletariat, who will eventually overthrow them. It criticised industrial capitalism as built on exploitation.

Proletariat = the industrial working class who sell their labour for wages. Bourgeoisie = the middle-class owners of factories and capital.

Banned children under 9 from textile mills, limited older children's hours, and created factory inspectors to enforce the rules — the first factory law with real teeth.

Ten Hours Act (1847) capped women's and young people's working day at 10 hours in textile factories. Public Health Act (1848) set up boards to improve water, drains and sewers in disease-ridden cities.

Two landmark events fell in 1848: Marx and Engels published The Communist Manifesto, and Parliament passed the Public Health Act responding to urban conditions.

Sustained growth, rising output and productivity, wider global trade, and deepening inequality between rich and poor.

The economy expanding steadily decade after decade, rather than in short bursts or depending on good harvests.

Reform legislation passed by Parliament, and workers self-organising into trade unions.

The 1833 Factory Act (limited child hours, added inspectors) and the 1847 Ten Hours Act (capped hours for women and children).

The 1867 and 1884 Reform Acts gave many working men the vote, so governments had to respond to workers, channelling anger into elections.

It gave trade unions legal protection, helping a reformist labour movement grow; late-1880s 'New Unionism' then organised unskilled workers too.

The world's first state welfare: health insurance (1883), accident insurance (1884), and old-age and disability insurance (1889).

Partly to draw workers away from the rising socialist movement by having the state provide welfare from the top down.

Britain: bottom-up, gradual reform laws and unions over a century. Germany: top-down, a rapid state insurance system in the 1880s.

It industrialized fast from the 1890s but gave workers no vote, legal unions or welfare, so discontent built up and exploded in the 1905 Revolution.

The more peaceful outlets (votes, unions, welfare) a society gave workers, the more its labour movement stayed reformist; the fewer outlets, the more revolutionary the pressure.

1883 sickness/health insurance, 1884 accident insurance, 1889 old-age and disability insurance.